Crowdsourcing: Get others to do the work

Okay, so originally I wanted to go to a panel titled, “Sausagefest: Getting More Women into New Media and Tech,” but that fell through. So I ended up at a talk about Crowdsourcing.

To put it simply, it’s a way to get large amounts of people to contribute to projects for a greater goal, usually for free. The panelists used Star Wars as a way to show how a popular topic can draw a large subset of people to participate in creating something. For example, one project is “Star Wars Uncut.” Here, the makers of the movie decided to ask people to create their own versions of certain scenes from Star Wars and submit 15-second clips, which would then be edited together to make a full-length film. The people weren’t paid but they ended up getting thousands of submissions.

The gist was that because the Internet has so many users, people will contribute to a larger cause for a low reward because they have passion for whatever the topic is. New media companies use this well to get people to write for free so they can post the content on a website, which in turn makes money for the business. Brilliant.